Case Study
UDX validation for largescale EV charging infrastructure project
Greater London Authority (GLA)
Customer:
Country:
UK
Urban Data Exchange (UDX) real-time data sharing platform
UDC Solution:
Local authorities such as the GLA require faster and more cost-effective ways of creating additional value from the data of different IoT and urban infrastructures that they deploy and acquire from diverse vendors. After spending considerable effort in developing an in-house tool for understanding the utilisation of current public EV charge point infrastructure in London across multiple providers, the GLA wanted to test and assess new tools and approaches on the market, that could simplify future data integration activities.
The Challenge
A validation project between GLA and UDC was established to better understand the capabilities of our core UDX solution when compared to their existing in-house platform, assessing whether UDX could meet the complex data integration requirements with lower in-house resource demands and shorter delivery timelines.
The Solution
Benefits
This project successfully validated our UDX solution, with the platform being rapidly deployed, successfully tested against the existing in-house GLA tools and fully meeting the GLAs own specific requirements. UDX could help address EV data problems without the need to invest in in-house systems and teams.
Local authorities and cities are increasingly turning to new data driven solutions to solve a variety of challenges they are facing. For example, to combat challenges with traffic and air pollution in London, the Greater London Authority (GLA) has over the years acquired several cutting-edge solutions such as IoT sensors for classifying traffic and measuring air quality and e-mobility infrastructure such as public EV charge points.
While such emerging solutions provide inherent benefits on their own, they are often limited in their isolation and unable to solve more complex challenges in city environments. For example, existing solution dashboards focus on specific usage scenarios that the vendors had in mind, but in reality new requirements and user questions quickly emerge in daily use that require more flexibility to explore the underlying data. Furthermore, with a separate dashboard for every system, it becomes increasingly difficult for users to get a holistic data view and insights. To get maximum value from these solutions requires data from such systems to be further processed, combined with other data, or to be shared with stakeholders beyond the initial service dashboards.
While most vendors provide access to their system data via some sort of API or through some export functionality, access is often diverse and does not fulfil the demand for more flexible data queries well. The diversity even applies to APIs that supposedly follow international standards and causes major challenges for cities to access such data or enable effective sharing across different stakeholders and partners.
To tackle the challenges of efficient data access across different bespoke system, the GLA has developed a range of in-house data integration tools that harmonise data access from diverse sources and provide combined dashboard views to improve decision making.
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One such example is a tool that the GLA developed to provide integrated decision making around public EV charge point infrastructure. With a large number of EV charge point operators (CPOs) providing public EV charging infrastructure across the Greater London area, it was becoming increasingly difficult for London Boroughs to manage existing infrastructure use and its future rollout efficiently. To improve and optimise future infrastructure planning, service level reporting and demand forecasting, the GLA required a unified and holistic view of their charge point network, providing detailed information and insights into charge point usage activity, operational down time per location and peak/off peak demand patterns.
With their partner CPOs using different proprietary APIs with varying levels of functionality and performance, and with data streams requiring repeated cleansing and reformatting, the GLA needed a solution that would simplify the overall data handling process whilst minimising human input and subsequent errors. The ability to automatically accept supplier data regardless of sources such as APIs or multi-format static data was a key requirement. The GLA also had concerns surrounding data quality, the ability for different datasets to be shared and wider issues involving the management of multiple data sharing agreements.
Having spent significant time and effort over several years in building such data integration and analysis tool with an inhouse team of software developers and data specialists, and then requiring further resources on the continuous maintenance, the GLA decided to explore the wider market for emerging data solutions that could augment their own tools and methodologies for any future data integration challenges that might be arising.
Having discovered our Urban Data Exchange product as a potential solution, the GLA engaged with Urban Data Collective to setup a project to validate the effectiveness and suitability of UDX to replace future inhouse data integration efforts.
Using the integration of public EV charge point data across different CPOs as an example, the project aimed at demonstrating whether UDX could fulfil both real-time and historic data integration requirements of the GLA’s existing inhouse tool and the complexity required in achieving the goals.
Utilising our core UDX solution, we were quickly able to connect into the CPOs real time data streams where possible, or process provided data snapshots in an automated way, resulting in significant operational improvements including:
A simplified, standards-compliant data access interface and API providing charge point network and session data across different CPOs
Faster access to data, reducing data access delay timescales in some cases from months down to days
Rapid project delivery with the potential of cutting down delivery timelines and significant staff time for future data integration efforts as well as ongoing maintenance efforts through increased workflow automation
New capability to compute charge session and utilisation data across multiple OCPI compliant CPOs using the same mechanism
Ability to now integrate and leverage additional data from CPOs who GLA currently has no commercial agreements with
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